Confidence, Anxiety, Resilience and More | AMA Vol. 4 with Dr. Michael Gervais

Michael Gervais (0:00)

All right, welcome to another Ask Me Anything. I'm Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training, a high-performance psychologist and host of the Finding Mastery podcast. For this AMA, a friend of Finding Mastery has dropped by. He's an actor, an improv artist, a former member of the Groundling Sunday Company, and he's got an epic new podcast called Three Black Eyes on a Couch.

O'Neil Cespedes, welcome to the Mastery Lab. This is gonna be great.

O'Neil Cespedes (0:25)

All right, great. Dr. Mike, how you doing today?

Michael Gervais (0:28)

Great.

O'Neil Cespedes (0:28)

Awesome, awesome. My man Pedro says, what are the steps to build resilience?

Michael Gervais (0:35)

It's a buzzword first.

People want resilience. They wanted the ability to, what most people think is bounce back. Really it's about being able to put your foot in the ground and bounce forward. So resilience is something people want.

And the hard part about building resilience is that you have to go through hard times. You have to do difficult things.

And so in the current state that we're in right now, when somebody asks that question, the first thing that happens for me is I go, okay, what's really happening? Because we are in hard times. So how are we gonna build resilience on top of the stress, the ambiguity, the uncertainty that's taking place right now? Which is really hard because it's like piling stress on stress. So how do you build resilience? Let me be uber clear. Is that you need to be able to go through and experience hard things. And there's three very specific ways that we think about it.

If you go through a hard experience and you, there are three Cs, we'll keep it that way. And you stay committed to your purpose in life. And if you don't have that, you stay committed to see the hard thing through. Okay, the first C is commitment. The second is that you reframe it like, okay, this is a challenge. This is an opportunity for me to see what I have. To be able to rise to this challenge because my purpose matters, okay? So it's commitment, challenge, and then the third C is about control, controlling what you can control. So if, Pedro, you're going through something tough right now, then, and you anchor to those three Cs, you will be in the process of building resiliency. Because people that go through hard times are, they're in the thick of it right now, but don't leverage those three, you just go through a hard time. If you want resilience, purposefully design experiences, or when you're in experiences, leverage those three. And here's what I'd add to it.

You can build resilience by not just doing the difficult thing that's required of you, you can do it by searching out doing difficult things. What does that mean daily? It means having a hard conversation with someone that you love. It means being honest and truthful. So there's, it doesn't need to be physical, it doesn't need to be technical at work, it can be emotional at home. And it requires a bit of vulnerability. How about it?

O'Neil Cespedes (3:02)

That last one seems like, if I'm speaking honestly here, that last one seems like something a lot of us don't wanna, I mean, I don't wanna have a hard conversation. I don't wanna, if I see someone that I owe money or something to and I see them across the street, I'm crossing the street until I get the money to give it to them, right?

Michael Gervais (3:18)

So that's not where I went.

Okay, so to your point, you don't wanna do, always build on the hard thing, right? And that's, I relate to that as well. But I'm not thinking about who I'm owing money to.

O'Neil Cespedes (3:31)

I mean, I don't owe anybody money, I'm just saying. This is an example, that's an example. I want my money. Pedro, I hope you got something from that, I understand that, okay? Don't owe anybody any money.

Nico has a long question for you, Dr. Mike. And when I say Nico has a long question for you, it's a long question.

I love your energy and wisdom. I have a question about my son, he's 17 He started playing tennis at eight. He has a dream to play college tennis in the USA. During practice, he performs at a very high level, but unfortunately, he can't perform during matches.

He's not present. He double faults, and I don't know what that means.

He double faults, he pushes the ball rather than hitting it. He chokes, he feels disgusted with himself. He wants to quit mid-match, but he doesn't wanna quit tennis. He still wants to chase his dream. What do you think is wrong, and what can I do to help him?